Writing Links

If you’ve only got 30 minutes to write, fine, write for those thirty minutes. If you’ve got a crying baby in the other room, don’t use that as an excuse not to write. (Although you should probably, you know, check on it first.) But make a little effort up front to clear what distractions you can. You want to set yourself up for success.

This article has some pretty solid advice on how to get more writing done with the time that you have. Apart from the “no writing when editing advice” I pretty much agree with everything said here.

Jason Kottke said that people’s love of pencils is “partly childhood nostalgia, partly how a craftsman comes to care for her tools, and partly the tactile experience. It’s also a blend of appreciation for both their aesthetic and functional qualities, and (especially these days, but not only these days), a soupçon of the disruptive passion that comes from willfully embracing what poses as the technologically obsolete.

I use a pencils a lot in my writing – particularly when it comes to places in my narrative where I get “lost for words”. Pencils are my favourite tool for quickly trying out several options, as they are particularly helpful tools for this kind of thinking.

I write every morning, seven days a week, and the momentum of writing every day is tremendously important to me, because I have no outline or plan and view writing as a transformation by the unconscious. I don’t know what will happen on the page each day, but there’s a shocking amount of pattern and structure that emerges, and I think this can happen only through a daily practice.

There’s a lot that Vann says in this interview that I disagree with, but it is still worth a few minutes of your time, if only for the list of authors that influenced him.